The author on how her latest novel grew out of her illness and the death of
her husband of almost 50 years

Penny Vincenzi almost died last year, which rather interrupted the flow of writing her 17th book. “I was properly ill,” says the novelist. “I was in hospital for six weeks. I had an extraordinary thing, a rare blood disorder called cryoglobulinemia, but it’s so rare that nobody knew what it was. I had learned doctor after learned doctor coming to my bed and taking my blood and making cultures. It started with pneumonia – and nobody knows if the pneumonia was a sign of the disorder, or if the disorder was a result of the pneumonia – and then I was admitted to a private hospital and all of my organs began packing up, finishing with kidney failure. I was swollen and bloated and one of the doctors later told me that when he first saw me he thought I was almost certainly going to die.”

When they finally worked out what was wrong with Vincenzi [cryoglobulinemia is a condition in which the blood has an abnormally high level of proteins that can become insoluble at lower temperatures], doctors tried to have her transferred to a larger, NHS hospital. She refused to go. “I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t go to the loo without being carried there. I’m not an awful private-medicine person, I am truly not, but I just felt safe there. In the end I only went because my four daughters told me to. They were fantastic and never let me know how worried they were. My youngest, Claudia, said to me: “The last day before they knew what it was, I just looked at you and thought 'f---’.’ It was quite horrible for them because it was only two years since their father had died. And I think it was all very…” Her stiff upper lip cuts in. “Anyway.”

Vincenzi, now 75, met her husband, Paul, an advertising executive, when she was just 19. It was love at first sight, and you feel that his death in his early seventies from a brain tumour in 2009, and the subsequent drama of her own illness, could have come straight out of one of her novels. She was “blue-lighted” to the hospital in an ambulance: “And I was frightened, I really was. The plasma in my blood was rotting, and that affects everything. I had a blood transfusion every day for 10 days. When they told me I could come out, I was institutionalised. I just panicked. I didn’t want to go back home. I stayed with kind friends who looked after me like I was a baby, which I was. And then I came home and people came to stay with me until finally I had a night all on my own.” She was out of “purdah”, as she puts it, by April last year.

Vincenzi may have been on the road to recovery physically, but it was at this stage that things got really bad. “Of course I felt incredibly bereft when I was ill, but I can remember thinking: 'Well, I might be about to die, and I will be with Paul soon.’ I did think that, and I am not actually a religious person. I think if I hadn’t had the girls, if I’d been alone in the world, then I would have stayed at the hospital and probably would have died, and I would have preferred it.”

When she was recovering, did she still feel this? “Yes of course I did!” she says. “I don’t think I ever formulated it as a proper thought, but I did feel it. I mean, I don’t want to sound wet or drippy because I have a lovely life. I think… I think the thing is that before I got ill, he had been dead for two years, so I had got used to… functioning. You don’t ever get over it, but you do get used to it. Life changes, and you become a different shape to suit that life. And you do go on being really sad. Sometimes, I still cry. Something will happen. Like I found a card…” She pauses and clears her throat. “I found a card that he had sent me, that I had put in a drawer. Anyway, by the time I got ill, I’d got used to the new shape and coping by myself. And then I was at home and alone again, and I felt very frail.”

Her daughters, of course, were visiting regularly, “but I felt bad about what I had done to them”, she says. ''They’ve all got babies [she has eight grandchildren aged between five months and 19 years], they’ve all got careers, and I just knew what a nuisance I was being. Mothers always feel guilt, don’t they?” Anyway, it was at this point that she started to miss her husband again “almost unbearably’’.

''What you lose is someone who is just there. Someone who you don’t even necessarily talk to for half the day, but if you tell them you’re never going to feel well again, they’ll tell you not to be so silly or make you have a drink. There is nobody to share your solitude with. It sort of rekindled the missing, if you see what I mean.” Does she think she could ever marry again? “Oh no,” she says, the very question absurd. “I was married for almost 50 years and you can’t replace that in any way. You just can’t. And I am told that divorce is worse. 'He’s still out there and it has ended unhappily.’ At least we had a happy ending; a very happy ending. He was ill for seven years with cancer but it was never acute and they somehow managed to keep him in remission all that time without the need for chemotherapy. He got very ill very quickly, and on the last morning of his life he was working on one of his projects in the study. That’s so lucky, don’t you think?”

When Vincenzi got better, she did the only thing she knew how to do: she wrote. “The book kept me going,” she says of her new tome. “I’d started it before I got ill and then my editor told me I could have as much time as I wanted. I said: 'No, I think I would like to stick to the deadline actually.’ I didn’t feel well enough to see people, but I did feel well enough to sit at my desk, so that’s what I did, and it was a complete life-saver.”

A Perfect Heritage is, as almost all Penny Vincenzi books are, an epic saga containing family secrets, romance and seriously strong women. This one concerns an aristocratic family who own a once-fabulous beauty brand that has started to lose its sheen. Enter one glamorous businesswoman who turns everyone’s life around – her own included. “I like using strong women because I envy them a lot,” says Vincenzi. “I could never dominate a boardroom or anything like that.”

A former fashion journalist who has worked for everyone from the Daily Mirror to Vogue, Vincenzi is not a cool or hip author, but she is popular. In a list of best-selling British writers of the 21st century’s first decade, she outsold Charles Dickens, A A Milne and Joanna Trollope. She has shifted more than 7 million incredibly weighty copies with titles such as Old Sins, Wicked Pleasures, Another Woman, An Outrageous Affair and An Absolute Scandal. The new book (like most of her others) is almost 1,000 pages long. “I try to write them short,” she says, almost as an apology, “but I just can’t. I’m always turning in 300,000, 330,000 words. It must be ingrained in me. I remember Frederick Forsyth saying that seven is the maximum number of characters a novel should have, and I think: 'God, I’ve already got six and we are only on chapter five!’ But they just come in because the story needs them, or the heroine needs them, or I need them.”

It takes her about a year to write a book – or more, if she is struck down by illness – and she never plots anything out. “I haven’t the faintest idea what is going to happen, ever. I just get the kernel of the idea, which in this case was supposing a company was about to go under, and then the characters wander in. I never have any idea what is going to happen at the end, I truly don’t, which is why they are so long.” Does she ever get writer’s block? “Oh no,” she says with a shake of her head. “I have a friend who does books, too, and he was party to a rather intense conversation about writing. Someone asked: 'What do you do when you get writer’s block?’ and he said: 'I’m not clever enough to get writer’s block!’ I do think there is an element of: 'Oh, it’s my art, you can’t cut that bit out because that’s the core.’ I don’t agonise. I do have terrible days when I realise I have gone down a completely blind alley and I’ve got to come back. The only cure is to press the delete button, I’m afraid. I once deleted 20,000 words, and I felt much better after that.”

Vincenzi was born in Bournemouth and moved to Devon when she was a child. “I had the most ordinary background you could possibly imagine, but I was an only child which was extremely important to shaping who I am.” Only children, says Vincenzi, are not like other people. “When you grow up, there is only you to please your parents. You tend to be quite a self-starter, quite ambitious.”

She was very close to her father. “I loved my mum, too, but he was probably my most important parent. And then I met Paul and he was unbelievably jealous. He couldn’t cope. There was another man in my life!” She laughs gently. “He never, ever quite accepted it. Even after I’d been married for 30 years he still thought I was going to come to my senses.” She always knew she wanted to write. “I edited the school magazine and the parish magazine. When I left school, I went to one of those posh secretarial colleges in London that had a journalism strand. It was jolly good, probably a lot better than most media studies degrees today.”

Her four children are her “lynchpins” and she jokes that she could have had another four. “I couldn’t afford to drink when I was pregnant with the first two, but I had a glass every day with the second two. Oh God,” she says, tapping me on the arm, “it was so much easier for us. If we smoked, we carried on smoking when we were pregnant. If you were going out with the baby, you just put them in the carry cot on the back seat of the car. There was no worry about feeding them organic food. And this sun thing!” She lets out an exasperated sigh. 'Oh my God, the sun’s come out, get a hat!’ I don’t know how our children survived, we did so many terrible things.”

They seem to have forgiven her. Recently she took her children and grandchildren away for a long weekend in Somerset to celebrate her birthday. Though she could easily retire, she knows she never will. “I will never stop writing. I will die at my desk. Actually, I’m quite torn about where I die. Maybe it will be in the garden of my cottage on the Gower, under the apple tree.” What would her epitaph be? “Not a day slipped away,” she says, quickly, before letting out a delightful laugh.